'Can't Happen Here'

is a line that often stops people
doing what they know is right,
where the speaker who is speaking,
then and for a long time after,
'seems right' though they are not.

For some the speaker who is speaking now
seems to be speaking for all of history
for the rest the point of history is to change it.

Other, different, places are available
and people will find the ways of finding them
and making them more possible for sharing.

'We Are Not Robots'

the sports spokeswoman said
explaining the refusal
of certain American sportsmen
to continue to perform to order
whilst their country rioted.

Rioters are definitely not robots,
but protesters against what they see
as unfairness beyond irony
in 'the land of the free'.

But the freedom of speech and action
that their country promised
was never to their ancestors,
who were indebted former slaves
who could never earn their freedom
from their former slave-masters
who if they understood the word 'robot'*
would have applied it to those they kept as debt-slaves.

*Robot is drawn from an old Church Slavonic word, robota, for “servitude”, “forced labour” or “drudgery.”. The word was a product of the central European system of serfdom by which a tenant's rent was paid for in forced labor or service. The word was applied to artificial/non-human automata in 1920, by Czech writer Karel Capek in his play R.U.R. where 'soul-less' robots rise up against their human owners, echoing the historic rebellions against slavery by slaves in America where their white owners 'had souls', but for being slaves, the labour those with souls believed they owned did not have souls. One of the conditions for having a soul was disbelieving that the people they buy/own/haggle with other (male, white) souls over can have souls in themselves. Go figure.....  

When An Apology Would Have Been Impossible (And Improbably Insincere If It Were Offered)

This is Ota Benga, once an exhibit in a Bronx zoo.
It took over a century for the zoo to admit that he was
used as an exhibit, and still the zoo will not come clean
about the racist politics and bogus racist science
behind how they used him. Read more about it here. 

In/Sanity

Doctor to Salesman; 'How can you sell something you don't understand?'

Salesman to Doctor; 'Not understanding it is what enables me to sell it.
                                  Isn't that what psychiatrists are paid to do?'  

A Sad Symmetry

When I was growing up
male sexuality was a thing of 'smash and grab'.

A random loss of consent where the male,
who in being lost in the sexual moment himself,
further confounded the temporal self awareness
of his highly unprepared would-be mate.

That this smash and grab happened mostly within marriage
was meant to make male violence seem safe

and make a virtue out of the woman 

becoming invisible to herself
for her being the lesser half 

of the man she had married.

Yes, sex did exist outside of marriage,
including sex between people of the same gender
but for it to survive intact it had to be kept invisible.

There Believers in suspicious churches
would act out their strange orthodoxies
and declare 'gay' relationships to be 'of the devil'
or in modern words 'psychologically disordered'.

They would stage public would-be exorcisms,
which were more like public trails with a jury,
where the church would re-enact the random anger
of the possessive aroused male, this time Jehovah,
to restore the old 'smash and grab' world order.

    

Without Blue There Is No Green

One of the best stories I heard recently
is the monetising of the recycling of fishing nets
across the world. There the poor retrieve them
from the seas where they damage wildlife
whilst ceasing to be of any service to fishermen.

There the poor exchange the waste nets for hard cash
which sustains hard pressed poorer communities.
After that the nets go on to become carpet tiling
of a very distinctive hue. Read more about it here.

A Dutiful Boy

I now prefer reading over television,
which I rarely watch deliberately,
but it was not always the case.

In the 1980's I read, studied,
and watched a huge amount of TV,
but it was never really 'me'.

The lives of the people on screen
that I watched from a distance
made my life feel second hand.

It felt like they were at a party
and my invite to go had got lost,
and by the time it arrived
the life of excess they lived was over.

I joined in later on,
and got to make my choice
of what became their leftovers.